The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
looked closer at the figure he was indicating. All I could make out was half a brow, some hair, most of a mouth. A thin face, young, quite pretty. I shrugged. ‘You tell me. No one I know.’
‘Really?’
‘What are you saying, Bobby?’
‘I could be wrong and I don’t want to steer you.’
I looked again. Peered carefully at the other faces for a while, to refresh my eyes. Then I glanced at the woman again. She still didn’t trigger anything.
‘It’s not my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m not. Keep looking.’
I did and finally something caught, and I let it come on. It took a few seconds, and then dropped like a brick. ‘Holy shit,’ I said.
‘You see it?’
I kept looking, expecting to become less sure. I didn’t. Once I’d seen it, it couldn’t be denied. Though a lot of her face was obscured, it was there in the eyes and the slope of the top half of her nose.
‘That’s Mary,’ I said. ‘Mary Richards. My parents’ neighbour. In Dyersburg.’ I opened my mouth to say something more – I’m not sure what – but then shut it again with a snap, sideswiped by a sudden flash of another image.
Bobby didn’t notice. ‘So what’s Ed doing in Montana back then? Or what was she doing here?’
‘You real set on waiting for this guy tonight?’
‘You got another plan?’
‘I might have something else to show you,’ I said. ‘And it’s cold and I don’t think we’re going to see Ed out here this evening. We should head back into town.’ My hands were trembling, and my throat felt dry.
‘Suits me.’
I got out of the car, went to the front of the trailer and broke back in. I scribbled a note on the back of the photo, apologizing for breaking in, and then propped it up in the middle of a card table. I added my cell number at the bottom, and then I left – taking a moment to reach back through the door and prop a magazine up against its inner surface.
Bobby drove back into town with the headlights off, but we saw no sign of anyone, and when we passed the bar the old Ford was not sitting in the lot. Neither, I realized only later, was the big red truck.
We checked into the Holiday Inn and I showered and took five as I waited for Bobby. The room was clean and fresh and reassuring. I had a big pot of coffee on hand, delivered by someone in a nice white uniform and an off-the-rack smile, which is usually the best type. I don’t have the Cheers gene. I’m quite happy with people not knowing my name.
I wished I still had the photograph. I wanted to look at it again, was already halfway to convincing myself it had been a trick of the light. That, and the fact that Mary’s dead face was imprinted strongly in my memory. Her body would be lying in a cold drawer in the morgue by now, but nobody would understand what had happened to her. I thought they should know, and running from Dyersburg still rankled with me. I was thinking that a phone call to the Dyersburg PD might point them in the right direction. They’d ask for my name and details, but I could make something up. I’m good at that kind of thing.
I had got as far as reaching for the phone when Bobby knocked on my door. I let the phone be and hauled myself out of the chair.
‘You okay?’ he said, as he shut the door.
‘Been a weird few days, Bobby.’
I opened up the laptop and placed it in the middle of the table. I motioned him to sit back in the other seat, then slipped the DVD-ROM into the slot and loaded up the bar scene from the video.
Loud music. Chaos. The drunken progress of the man holding the camera. The coughing fit, and then a walk round the corner into the area where people were playing pool. A young couple stood with their backs to the camera, and a big man with a beard and his girlfriend were lining up to take their shot.
The camera staggered closer, and the girl with the long hair glanced up. I hit PAUSE on the player software and froze the video on her face. I hit a couple of keys to save a graphic capture of the screen, then booted up Photoshop. I opened up the capture, and this time zoomed in on the woman’s face. I grabbed some background, and wiped it over the lower portions of her long hair to remove it. I cloned some skin texture and cut in around her cheeks, making them older and wider, and then picked up some hair and changed the style to one more suitable for an old lady in the year 2002. Did a quick selection, dropped in a steel grey, and then finally added noise over the altered part of the image to mask the difference in grain, followed by a Guassian blur to take the sharp edges away. I zoomed back out again until the picture was half its natural size, and the rough editing was less apparent in the quality of the image.
You had to ignore the fact that part of the scene around the face now looked odd, but it wasn’t hard given what had been revealed in the centre. I’d suspected this since Ed’s trailer, but seeing it on-screen still made me feel breathless.
‘Okay,’ Bobby said, very quietly. ‘That’s her again. Along with your parents.’
‘But they only met Mary when they moved to Montana.’
‘And they said something like: “This Mary woman. Complete newcomer in our lives. Certainly never met her before.”’
‘They acted as if they’d only known each other a couple of years.’ My head was spinning. ‘And I remember my mother telling me about how she’d just met Mary when she came round with cookies the day they moved in.’
‘When actually they’d known each other for over thirty years.’ Meanwhile he’d spooled through the clip and frozen the image on the girl sitting cross-legged and weaving on my parents’ living-room floor.
I nodded. The way the light caught her nose and cheekbones, you didn’t even have to do any editing. It was Mary.
‘So what do you think about the Ed guy? Could he be the cameraman?’
‘The only time I saw him and my dad in the same room they behaved like strangers.’ I’d already described this occasion to Bobby on the way out to the bar. ‘But they must have known each other. They all did. For some reason, Mary moves out, possibly not even that long after the time shown in the video. She’d certainly been in Montana a long while before my folks moved out there. In the meantime, my parents and Ed stay here, but not in contact, and the one time I accidentally bring them together, my father lets it happen but neither acknowledges the other.’ I thought back to the occasions when I’d met Mary at my folks’ house, but all that did was confirm my existing impression – which is that if they’d all known each other before Montana, they went to some trouble for it not to appear that way. I was wondering why they’d all bother to hide this fact from me, and then saw this was muddled and egocentric thinking.
My parents went out there on purpose, I realized. ‘They went there because they thought or knew something was going to happen, and that’s why the three of them pretended not to know each other.’
‘You’re stretching just a little bit.’
‘Am I? Maybe Mary wasn’t killed just because she was in the way. Maybe whoever came out to the house had two jobs, and Mary was one of them.’
Bobby considered, nodded. ‘Then, when you turn up back in Hunter’s Rock, Ed runs like a jackrabbit.’
‘We should have stayed out at his trailer.’
He shook his head. ‘He’s not going back there in a hurry. By now he’ll have called the guy at the bar, and found you know where he lives. Plus you’re looking too zonked for any action that might involve chasing people. You left